Traditionally, payment transaction disputes have been resolved through a series of exchanges of information between the various parties involved in a transaction. When a dispute arose in the past, the investigator of the dispute would send information about the dispute to the merchant via the postal system. The investigator would have to print out the information for mailing to the merchant. This resulted in the handling of the dispute manually—which inevitably led to extended time periods for resolving the dispute and the merchant being debited for a longer period of time. Thus, there was an extended cycle time and a greater possibility that a dispute would not be resolved properly based on the extended time periods that arise under the manual handling of disputes.
In the credit dispute process, the customer typically has 45 days to dispute a charge. Then, the merchant has 45 days to respond to the disputed charge, i.e., the “chargeback.” If the merchant disputes the chargeback, the customer again has 45 days to dispute the merchant's response. Thus, time is valuable in disputing these charges to both the merchant and the customer. A delay in processing due to loss of information or misrouting of information can easily lead to missing a dispute resolution deadline.